The "greenest government ever" has delivered the blackest budget in living memory. It provides a roaring incentive to use more oil, just as we might be heading towards an oil crisis. It has given the green light to the aviation industry to keep expanding, despite the government's promise to limit its impact. It has made a mockery of green investment. Perhaps most disturbingly, it has ripped up the social contract which has prevailed in this country since 1947, which ensured that developers, through the planning laws, were accountable to the people.

Let's begin with that last item, because everything about it is extraordinary. The first question is what on earth it is doing in a budget statement? The budget is supposed to concern the government's finances, where's the connection to planning legislation? The likely explanation is that the government has decided this is the best place to bury bad news; it is sneaking it through while we're distracted by the fiscal measures.

It describes the policy as "introduc[ing] a new presumption in favour of sustainable development, so that the default answer to development is 'yes'". Notice the slip up? It starts off as "sustainable development", creating the impression that Osborne is talking about solar panels and bird hides. Seven words later, you realise he means everything. It is, in other words, the opposite of sustainable. So much for the promise by the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, of more local control over development; this presents yet another barrier to communities trying to prevent Tesco from trashing their towns.

Osborne has abolished the fuel duty escalator, cut fuel tax for vehicles, frozen air passenger duty rates and dismissed – on the untested assumption that it would contravene international law – a tax on planes that would have discouraged airlines from running them half-empty. These measures send the clearest possible signal that he has no intention of reforming our planet-trashing, resource-guzzling transport systems, before they run into the wall of peak oil and climate change. This is populism of the crudest kind, which might delight the Mail and the Sun, but shows that, for all his talk of tough choices and difficult decisions, the chancellor is a chicken.

Talking of which, he has bumped the date when the Green Investment Bank will start borrowing to the start of financial year 2015-2016, which happens to be the end of this government's term in office (if it doesn't come sooner). In other words, Osborne will not, unless he remains chancellor beyond that point, take responsibility for a measure that will contribute to the national debt, but prefers to pass it on to his successors.

Decisive action on greening the economy is deferred yet again.

This budget is perverse, regressive, destructive, cowardly. It's a charter for corporations, which gives two fingers to the public interest. It demonstrates what many of us had suspected but had hoped was not true: that the government was lying when it promised to protect the environment.